We've got a tipi. The tipi wants to go to the Sunrise festival. We need to get the tipi get there sustainably. The 14 poles are 20ft (7 meters) long, and the rest of the kit weighs about 80kg. And we'd like to use bikes please! (Check the bottom post for intro...)

Thursday, 19 April 2007

Trigger has saved the day by donating a beaut of a bike, a Secialized HardRock, so now we've got two fully working bikes which can pull the load! It comes with some fat daddied up pedals, and some caliper brakes with some good stopping power. This is what it would look like if we gave it a spring clean...

Wednesday, 11 April 2007

"Wot you need is 16 skateboards and a trapese.... attached a skateboard to each of the tipi poles then set the trapese high up inside so you can look out the smoke hole you could use the tipi flaps as sails and sail the bloody thing to wherever you need to get it to.... bicycle power tut."

Tuesday, 10 April 2007

Today I was dubbed insane by a guest who came round for lunch. A 40kg weight for a bike trailer will, apparently, make this mission impossible. Rubbish. Good name for a film though. So I went out into the yard and got a feel for what I was up against.

This time when I went outside I was in Wales with all the hardware and tools I could dream of. I sawed off a fence post for the crossbar, found some rails to simulate the poles and tied them to a sacktruck at the back.

I'm notoriously crap with knots, but here's how I managed to string the crossbar and poles together. Also, two ties run from the ends of the cross bar to the bike frame to keep the crossbar horizontal:

And it worked!!! Hahaha! Tim, if you're reading, I'll have the 'norick tc-2' with the 'spectra blue' visor please:

AND THEN, I put not one, but TWO feeds sack on the back of the poles. That 50kgs motherfu****! And it went - and slightly up hill too! So all the doubters can kiss the fattest part of my ass.

That said, there's a few things which need some work:

- We need some hard core luggage straps to tie these poles onto. Nylon won't cut it.- Gonna have to make that carriage out of something suitable for the road. The sack truck wheels were far too small. Bike wheels would be perfect - gonna have to get welding.- The poles got in the way of steering a bit, so we need to play with the geometry of the carriage and the crossbar...

Wednesday, 4 April 2007

The bike appeal is going jolly well. Big thanks to Susan Macnab and Simon Field who replied to the notice board notice (board notice) and donated these beauties to the cause, and Shirley's offered some of the kids bikes! (The kids may or may not know this)

We still need more though, so if you've got an old set of wheels, we're all ears.

Designs are starting to jump out at us just looking at these old rigs, brilliant, ta!